Scrapple no longer meets so this blog has become my own way to keep things that interest me: articles about research libraries providing access to scholarly output, things that happen in my day, stuff I might use in a class some day, things I don't want to forget, you know.

It sure seems like a cool technology but I've never been able to figure out if it's more than just cool sounding because the data available to search are so small. Academic Search Premier should be a good one to try this out on.

I went to San Antonio over the weekend for ALA mid-winter. Here's are some brief notes on some of what I saw:

EX LIBRIS meeting we got good news from about date for starting to use x-server (earlier) and info about training (web based and we can subscribe to it for a year if we want -- I'm not sure what that means exactly but it sounded good.)

Sirsi/Dynix meeting was pretty ordinary except I found I like the president of the company better than the last time I attended one of these meetings. Probably because he also likes the idea of a movie-only search space. I still don't know if we can do it now but it helps to know the president of the company is enthused about doing it.

Scholarly Stats -- I hope we can get this. It's a service that harvests all your e-use stats (even non-counter compliant ones), cleans them up and puts them in a csv file. If you've ever had to gather use stats you would be falling down at these guy's feet. It's about $30-40 for each platform (FirstSearch, CSA, EBSCOhost, etc.)

Web of Science -- got a contact for xml gateway but the guy I spoke with pointed out that this is definitely a dbase we'll need to watch for excessive turn aways.

WebFeat (http://www.webfeat.org/) -- saw presentations by several institutions using it. Some had features I like (e.g., check off box for dbase selection) I made notes so we can borrow liberally.

Alamo -- I walked by it every day but never went in. I'd been in several times before and was pretty sure it's about the same--I'm absolutely sure they still haven't put a basement in it.

Souvenir shops -- the best ones (if you like odd/quiry artesanal products) are definitely not on the first floor. I bought several more coconut masks (like the one hanging in my office) and a microscope made out of a spark plug, washers and other bits of metal welded together. There is some great self-taught sculpture from scraps around. Had I a few hundred dollars to waste I'd need a trunk to get it all back.

On Saturday I leave for Veracruz for an Austin Smiles mission on which I'll be translating. We stay in the Hotel Camino Real. We're at the Red Cross hospital pretty much all day but in the evenings we go out to eat together.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

It seems slower to me than in the past but I'm not sure whether it's me or if the conference has changed.

The best thing I've seen here is Scholarly Stats, a company that will go out and gather all your online use stats, normalize them where possible and hand them to you as a csv file so that you can do your own analysis. I'm hoping we can get it.

Sirsi/Dynix has a new scheme for rolling out their new products. They will have 'migration scripts' that will allow us to go on using the existing version of the system while we are testing our own data and then do the cut over when we want to. What's not to like.

They told Ron that they understood why the sloooow response time to the WebReporter and think the most recent upgrade should have fixed it.

The prospects for getting a slightly early start on x-server look good.

Unfortunately my scheduled meeting with some folks from the International Relations Round Table fell through. We were going to talk about setting up an open URL link resolver for folks in deveopig nations. I'm not sure what happened, they just didn't show.Go figure.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

I'm heading out this morning to go back home since I've been in San Antonio since Tuesday for an intensive seminar for new library directors. If you go to any of the interesting technology show case sessions, please post some of your thoughts here. I'm wishing now I had stayed longer, but also want to get back to Jonathan.

I'm looking forward to ACRL Baltimore....we'll have to have a Scrapple alum meeting there for current and past Hopkins folks.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Rutgers has a page (article?) announcing a graphical password system. Instead of using letters and numbers you use images and click on selected areas on the image.

I've been using a graphical password for some time now with my bank but it works slightly differently. They show me an image and a phrase I created myself to make me confident that I have indeed gone to their web site. When I see that I can be confident ane enter my password. Trust goes both ways.

We have a great video collection and we know that lots of people want to pick out a movie for the weekend. Of course, that's just a royal pain to do-- you can't browse like at Blockbuster and the catalog is hard to use. So what if we had a Movie Library catalog...or maybe a Movie library portal channel. We would provide a search interface specifically desigined for searching and displaying records for films. We could do things like:

offer the choice of format -- dvd or video (we could do this because DVD call numbers begin with DVD and video call numbers begin with video)

steal from the ncsu catalog format and give our interface a side frame with links to all the named people in the record, maybe to genre types like feature film, comedy, film noir...

lots of records for films include a summary that would be good to highllight

wonder if we could get images like the ones you see in IMDB?

We'd want to work with someone who does film cataloging to see what other features could be pulled out. And I like the ncsu catalog function that allows you to return only items that are not checked out.

I love what she has to say -- she understands that you just can't shove everything into a single Integrated System. No matter how hard you try, something new will come along that doesn't fit the model. You have to be able to pull up related info from different sources in real time. She calls the system as a whole the E-Matrix and says what we really need is a mashup of all these different pieces of info.

OK so right now we've got (or will soon have) these knowledgebases -- if you will forgive the term

SFX

MetaLib (JHsearch)

our catalog records (MARC info)

new E-Resource Management System

vendor A&I dbases like EBSCO (some full text)

The question is, how will we mashup all those sources? We've got our Web Site and we're going to have portals. What goes where? When do we pull in personalization?

Monday, January 16, 2006

Is it just me or does it seem like we're seeing a speed up in the tempo of Windows vulnerability alerts. Newest one is for machines that automatically search for wi-fi connection on boot up. Not that it's that big a deal. But still...

"Criminal gangs were unlikely to target this flaw as it would be too labor-intensive to exploit, predicted MessageLabs, saying that it was "really a threat from script kiddies".